Hadleigh, B., "Goldie Looks to the Future," in
Film Monthly
, October 1990.

Radio Times
(London), 16 March 1991.

Hirschberg, Lynn, "Solid Goldie,"
Vanity Fair
(New York), March 1992.

Stars
(Mariembourg), Spring 1993.

Iskusstvo Kino
(Moscow), July 1993.

* * *

It is the rare film fan who does not know that Goldie Hawn began her
career playing the dumb, forgetful blond on television's
Laugh-In
. But few, save industry insiders, realize that during the 1980s Goldie
Hawn had become one of the most powerful producers in Hollywood, occupying
a rung of power below only the likes of a Steven Spielberg or a George
Lucas.
Private Benjamin
proved her mettle;
Swing Shift
and
Protocol
, while fascinating films, failed at the box office.

The remarkable fact is that Hawn, with her image as the "dizzy
blond," was able to acquire so much clout in the first place. In
the 1960s few women were able to make their way from television fame to
stardom on the silver screen. Goldie Hawn's Emmy-winning work on
the hit
Laugh-In
changed that, launching her movie career, as well as introducing the
world to the considerable talents of Lily Tomlin.

Goldie Hawn made her first major motion picture count. She won an Oscar,
as best supporting actress, for
Cactus Flower
in 1969. By the early 1970s she was considered a rising young star. Her
performance in Steven Spielberg's
The Sugarland Express
brought her notice among the rising young talents behind the camera; her
fame spread because of the millions paid to see Hal Ashby's
Shampoo
. But Goldie Hawn aspired to gain control of her projects.

After a disappointment producing
The Girl from Petrovka
, her break came with
Private Benjamin
for which she served as executive producer and star.
Private Benjamin
is the tale of a bubbleheaded,
spoiled Jewish American Princess who enlists in the army and changes into
a strong, mature woman. This was tailor-made for Hawn by Hawn, made a lot
of money, and was eventually turned into an short-lived television series
in which she did not star.

But being a producer was fraught with peril.
Wildcats
, directed by Michael Ritchie, has Hawn as a divorced mother of two who
asks to become the football coach and with grit takes on the job for an
inner-city Chicago high school. Eventually she earns the team's
respect and in the end coaches the team to a win in the big game (over the
high school she worked at) and "proves" that women can coach
football as well as men. Hawn the producer seems to be satisfied with
obvious comic situations; it was hard to locate fresh "Goldie
Hawn" vehicles.

Yet there were major exceptions. Her best work proved very, very good. For
example, as the creative force behind
Swing Shift
, released in 1984 through Warner Brothers, producer Hawn and director
Jonathan Demme crafted a complex tale of the female workers in a defense
plant during World War II. The reaction of a Los Angeles, emerging into a
mature city, and the sexual tension of the war—women doing
traditionally men's roles—was contrast with the difficulties
of maintaining relationships near and far away. This is a rare Hollywood
film told from a woman's point of view. But therein comes the
contradiction.
Swing Shift
was not what the public thought of a typical "Goldie Hawn"
film and the movie quietly disappeared into the world of home video.

The contradiction can be fully appreciated by contrasting
Swing Shift
with a more typical Hawn-produced farce,
Protocol
. With a more conventional director, Herbert Ross, and a promising
screenplay by Buck Henry, we have a scatterbrained "Goldie"
(here named Sunny) who gets caught up in the world of politics in our
nation's capitol. Critics called it, appropriately, "Goldie
Goes to Washington." The pace was rapid fire, the jokes sometimes
offensive (in particular to Arabs), but the laughs were genuine. In the
end the critics found the film contrived. The film also made not as much
money as expected and so the star of Goldie Hawn, the perpetual
scatterbrained, blond smarter than she seemed at first glance, was giving
way to a 45-year-old woman with few available roles.

The 1990s have not been good to Hawn, with little success associated with
Deceived
,
Crisscross
, or
Housesitter
. Her work as co-executive producer of
My Blue Heaven
also did not change the downward direction of her acting career. The
1990s were better on television with
An Evening with Bette, Cher, Goldie, Meryl, Olivia, Lily and Robin
, for ABC, and regular appearances on the annual Academy Awards shows. One
wishes her luck as she begins to transform her career as a motion picture
director.

—Douglas Gomery

User Contributions:

Comment about this article, ask questions, or add new information about this topic: